It’s easy to be enchanted by a city you’ve never been, and Gopnik was enamoured of Paris before he’d so much as visited it. His first trip only served to solidify his ideas of the city’s charms: “The trees cast patterned light on the street. We went out for dinner and, for fifteen francs, had the best meal I had ever eaten, and most of all, nobody who lived there seemed to notice or care. The beauty and the braised trout alike were just part of life, the way we do things here” (p 7). When, as an adult, Gopnik moved to France, the romance continued: “The romance of Paris was my subject, and if it is a moony or even a loony one, it is at least the one I get, a little” (p 10). So there we have two of Gopnik’s concerns, beauty and romance, and there also part of why his writing appeals so much to me. And a third: the city as city, the city’s life. What he writes of Paris is, or could be, I think, true of many big cities: “What truly makes Paris beautiful is the intermingling of the monumental and the personal, the abstract and the footsore particular, it and you. A city of vast and impersonal set piece architecture, it is also a city of small and intricate, improvised experience” (p 8).
This collection of essays is often amusing (as when Gopnik buys the wrong kind of Christmas lights), often tender (both towards Paris and his young son) and often lovely, though there are the dull spots, too (for me: the essay about the World Cup and the tale of a family-run restaurant recently bought out). What I liked best was the shimmer and sparkle of Paris, and how Gopnik captures them: the wonder of Deyrolle, the famous old taxidermy shop, or the way the Eiffel Tower’s lit up for the millennium, all brilliance, “like champagne,” as his son says.
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